Yesterday I spoke at a panel on “Monetary Policy in the Future,” with Ben Bernanke and Gill Marcus at an IMF event Rethinking Macro Policy. A written version of my opening is posted below (longer than my usual post). Ben Bernanke posted his opening here. Our views are quite different and a serious debate followed (see USA Today article) about which I’ll write later.
Let me begin with a mini history of monetary policy in the United States during the past 50 years. When I first started doing monetary economics in the late 1960s and 1970s, monetary policy was highly discretionary and interventionist. It went from boom to bust and back again, repeatedly falling behind the curve, and then over-reacting. The Fed had lofty goals but no consistent strategy. If you measure macroeconomic performance as I do by both price stability and output stability, the results were terrible. Unemployment…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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